Internal Monologue I'm masquerading. Nobody else can see it, they don't realise there's a crocodile on their midst. It's obvious though, in so many ways I am screaming at the top of my lungs just how different I am, I am honestly surprised its taken this long for anyone to notice. The phrase Crocodile Tears has never been truer. Not once, through the panic attacks and the shaking and the the shouting at my mirror, have I ever cried. I daresay that is proof enough that I'm not wired properly. Biology says I am made of muscle and sinew but I just can't make it add up. Cells are not malicious, the lump of grey residing behind my eyes surely can't be responsible for the thoughts it thinks. No, somewhere I must have a few extra parts; nettles in my throat and stones in the pit of my stomach and perhaps even nightshade in my veins. That's the only explanation. I am a changeling child and I am self destructing in plain sight. Not crying though, that's a luxury I do not deserve.

Casual Apparitions (3) Mother rarely spoke to me, but when she did her mind was a jewellery box. Pearls and jewels of wisdom dropped in strings from her too red lips, metaphors and anecdotes conjured from the air as if they were nothing. Due to my Cloud!Fever I remember very little of what she said, but one phrase of hers sticks in my mind even now, clinging to my mind like her perfume still clings to my skin. "Never forget. Nostalgia is a chocolate dipped in mercury." Now you can argue the meaning of this phrase if you like, for many will no doubt say it is hardly advice, but I know exactly what she meant. It was a warning, of sorts, and one I have to remind myself of frequently. It means Nostalgia, and I use that capital as a indicator of gravitas, is a killer of the cruelest kind. The more you dip into it the hungrier for it become, the more you indulge in it the sicker you get. You gorge yourself on the past and live it fervently, getting weaker and weaker and less and less sustained by it until you eat yourself to death. A pleasurable death maybe, but a graceless one. Love is like that too, when you think about it. xxx "So.. how was it?" LilyWhite was curled up on the edge of my bed with her head on her knees, eyes flicked up to stare at me. She was dressed in the most extravagant outfit I had seen her in so far, layers and layers of ripped white lace spread across my floor and taking up roughly half the room. Not for the first time I reflected on the benefits of her being imaginary, this was one of the more appreciated ones. "What do you want me to say Lil'? He's complicated and mysterious and divine and he likes Peter Pan. He also seems to be real, which is nice, and didn't seem so utterly repulsed by me that he couldn't hide it. He's perfect." LilyWhite cracked a small smile and toyed with one of the many feathers in her hair. "So you like him." I turned from my diary-writing to stare at her. "Don't make jokes Lily. Of course I don't like him, that would require an emotional range much healthier than mine. Liking people is for those lucky few stable enough to have asperations of relationships, not jangling bags of bones so broken that any kind of attachment comes with a thousand flashing red lights." Lily blinked up at me. "So you like him." "I will concede to finding him fascinating, but I'm not letting it go further. I am not so grossly hopeful. He's just someone to talk to on those rare occasions I go outside." Lily did not seem convinced, but I did not care. I could not let myself get too invested in him, and even if I was, denial seemed a better idea than inevitable hurt. Instead of dwelling on it I chose a far crueler approach - attack. "Speaking of... whatever happened to you and Far?" I regretted my words almost immediatley, when my friend turned a pretty bubblegum pink all over and literally shrank out of existance, leaving an exquisitley made (but unfortunatley intangible) dress lying on the bed in her wake. Whatever had happened, I concluded, must have been pretty awful for her and so was none of my business. In some recess of my mind though I was far from satistfied, mainly because they were my imaginary friends and I should know what was going on with them. Then I realised, with just a little twinge of terror, that I was alone. For what felt like the first time in a long time I was without company of any kind, real or otherwise. I did the sensible thing, what anyone in the same position would have done, and panicked. I shan't bore you with the details, for shaking and screaming are dynamic but hardly interesting, and it's hard to recount them in any way that isn't incredibly unpleasant. I will say however, that when I hit fever pitch and the white noise that constantly seemed to buzz inside my skull reversed to be outside pushing in, the one pallid face to float to the forefront of my mind was Jared's. And that is a fact I was not at all proud of, because it seemed that maybe infatuation had won the day, and the fact that he had such a pull on me already was unsettling to say the least. I had spent my #life in a state of perpetual detachment, and this perfect, idiotic boy had smashed my boundries. Jesus, I was pathetic.

Casual Apparitions (2) Insanity is a curious thing. It is defined as repetition of the same action with the expectation of a different outcome. The thing is, if this is so, then we are all insane. Me, you, your teachers, your parents. We do the same job each day and hope this will be the day we start enjoying it, we get into relationships and hope this will be the one to last. We go to sleep and hope this time we will wake enlightened. So are we not all, in some sick and twisted way, expected to be insane? Is insanity simply… Optimism? *** “Do I look okay?” It was Saturday, and I was stood in front of my full length mirror with a critical hand on my hip. Behind me, LilyWhite was placing with my hair, teasing it up and letting it fall back over my shoulders. Somehow the rule about imaginary friends touching tangible things had never applied to me, which meant we could maintain contact quite easily. In the interest of transparency I will describe LilyWhite for you, because she is a very remarkable looking person. Hair that fell in perfect waves around her face and to her waist, dyed in every hue from pastel green to rosebud pink, laced with scraps of fabric and feathers. Her skin was white to the point of translucent, figure thin to the point of skeletal. She used to be called BirdBones, but hated that name with a passion. Her eyes were cloudy, milky and pink. They were also huge, giving her the air of a permanently startled deer. In comparison I looked positively bland. My red converse, blue jeans, oversized white jumper, it was all so stereotypically teenage. Add to that the fact I wasn’t wearing make-up, and my backpack was practically falling apart, and it was all LilyWhite could do to convince me to leave the house. Not that she was doing this for my sake of course. She, unlike Far, couldn’t leave the house. She was far too shy, and I had only starting seeing her again when I returned to this room. Leaving her had been among my very few chief regrets, and now she wanted to hear about the mysterious boy for herself. “You look lovely,” she mumbled “Very quirky girl next door." LilyWhite would say that, I had to remind myself on a daily basis that we can’t all be resplendent in peasant dresses and heavy black boots. Besides, she would have said anything to get me out of the house, for a 17 year old she was surprisingly motherly at times. Heaving my bag over my shoulder, I slipped downstairs and outside. It was early, with dad already at work and everyone else sleeping. I had my supplies (consisting of a notebook and pen, my ipod, a flask of strawberry lemonade and three nutella sandwiches) and thanks to some careful thought on my part, knew exactly where I was going. I’d also concluded that Far was the least helpful person ever and hadn’t been all too sorry when he declared he was taking off. He would be back after-all, he always came back. He always tended to leave upon noticing LilyWhite was around, apparently because “her ghostly countenance made him uncomfortable,” but much more likely because they had history. LilyWhite, for her part, blushed furiously whenever his name came up and promptly vanished into my wardrobe if I ever pressed the subject. Once outside I turned left and began the long walk down the street, snaking in between the lamp-posts standing to attention on either side of the road. I passed identical gardens with identical husbands lounging, and identical long-necked, ratty-haired wives sitting in front of identical TV’s. It was a sorry enough sight to get anybody down, but I was feeling pretty good, like I was breathing freely. Then I reached it. The last Good Place. It was little more than a circle of trees, a patch of charred ground used for years as a campsite. Set away from the rest of the woods, it had been abandoned in favour of corner shops and swing-sets, and was now impossible to get to without scaling branches and dodging nettles. In the middle however, it was an island of safety. My favourite place. I steeled myself as I climbed high into the tangle of branches. Curled against the leaves I was completely invisible, ready to drop down into the small island of clear ground. I was hesitant though, so much depended on what I might find should I look. Then I saw the hopeful eyes of LilyWhite, and envisioned wiping the cool smile of Far’s goddamn face, and it leant me strength. I was not disappointed. Leaning against my tree was the most beautiful boy that I have ever seen, even to this day. Of course, I was above him so my view was compromised, but even so he was lustrous; radiantly so. Pale figure folded gracefully against the bark, one hand resting in a mop of white hair. It is important at this point to acknowledge this, for it was utterly unique. His hair was not bleached white-blond, nor was it was not slightly grey, or slightly yellow, or slightly blue. It was best described as an absence of colour, pure and simple and clean. The effect was jarring, but divine. It made you want to touch it just to assure yourself it was real. In any event, he seemed perfect. I couldn’t help but give a stupid teenage intake of breath, the result of which was the mystery man glancing up with a look of confusion on his perfect mystery face. His eyes were the kind of grey I could write about forever, but suffice to say they had the same lack of colour to an even more dazzling effect. I was finding it just a little difficult to catch my breath. “God, this is embarrassing. I seem to have made the acquaintance of a sentient tree. I apologise for the leaning, I guess we know each other quite intimately now." His voice was a breath of wind across violin strings. I dropped down from my hiding place and landed a little closer to him than was probably socially accceptable. We stood like that for a little while, the top of my head at the level of his lips, our breathing in time. It sounds awfully romantic I know, especially with him being so drop-dead attractive, but in truth I could feel myself trembling. Hot or not, I was alone in an enclosed space with a stranger at his request, I was scared. “Well,” he said, the curve of his lips evident in his voice “You are by far the most beautiful tree I’ve ever met. I do apologise for my previous comment, I can assure you I don’t normally declare to intimately know perfectly innocent forest girls.” I couldn’t help it, I fluttered back. “That implies there have been other forest girls.” “But of course. None have ever actually made the entrance you did though, it begs the question… Did it hurt?” “Did what hurt?” He grinned, and it made my heart do acrobatics. “Falling from heaven.” Oh dear God. I was in a mysterious walled garden with a curiously but not conventionally attractive boy, literally at his mercy, and the first thing he did was use the cutest pickup line of all time on me without it sounding cliché or forced. Damn. I shook my hair in front of my face to hide my blush, and sank to the floor. It was not until much, much later that I realised I had placed my bag on my knees as a barrier between us. Old habits die hard, after-all. I took the opportunity to watch as he folded himself gracefully onto the grass beside me. He sat with his knees drawn right up, his right hand absent-mindedly twisting through his hair. His head lolled on to one shoulder as he looked at me, seemingly waiting for me to speak. "So how did you know this was my favourite place?" He laughed and it was not so much breeze over bowstrings as velvet on skin, as if slowly he was trying to become the entire theatre. When he had composed himself, he stared straight into my eyes. "It was simple really, this is the only place one can go to be alone. It's odd, but this place has no character at all. There are no hollow trees, no long forgotten alleys, no nothing. It's as if this entire town is a testament to generic-ness." I wanted to comment on the fact that generic-ness really was not a word, but I understood the sentiment. I had noticed the second I moved there that there were no escape routes in that town. It was like a default, a template. Everything was open and there was absolutley nowhere to hide. For a girl with a few hundred imaginary friends and compulsion to run away from any kind of contact, I felt the bareness most acutley. Finding the garden had been a godsend. "So you've just been coming here everyday, hoping that someone would show?" I gave him an inquisitive look. That was, from my (very) limited experience, not typical guy behavior. "Oh hell no. I left that letter there forever ago, when I was full of delusions about the idiocy of normality and the romance that was to be found in meeting another outcast. After a few days, however, I realised nobody was coming, and used video games and loud music as balms for my proverbial wounds. I was only visiting today for nostalgia's sake, hence my look of suprise when you fell out of the sky like a better dressed Wendy-Bird." Oh. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that. It meant that he had just given up and been normal like everyone else, and that made my insides boil. I had a horrible suspicion though, that my anger was not the self-rightious kind, but thinly veiled envy. Being normal had never been an option for me, not with my "hallucinations" and occasional gaps in memory. I had an instilled love-hate relationship with the idea of getting better, it was like being offered the ability to walk after being paralysed, but being told you had to leave your ability to see colours at the door. Part of me wasn't sure it was worth it. Then again, part of me was still fighting down a smile at the mystery boy's Peter Pan reference. "Lucky really, what were the odds of us both showing up?" I said it somewhat shyly. "Destiny, darling, has a way of arranging such things..." This guys ability to make me blush reminded me why I tended not to go outside. It was very embarassing. A silence followed. There was no need to fill it. I, of course, did. "My name's Sophia, by the way." "The pleasure is all mine. I'm Jared." I nodded. The exchange of first but not last names seemed significant somehow. It was comfortable, just a little intimate, and it seemed to be deliberate. To give a last name was mundane, ordinary. Looking back, I can see that we were already trying to distance ourselves from other people. It was something I was all too good at by this point, and having someone share in this detachment had a sweetness too it. Lightning laced with honey... Dangerous, but not to the point of being discouraging. Jared stood, brushing of his jeans with the air of someone for whom time stopped. It was only when he turned that I realised what was happening. My heart, as enfeebled as it was, gave a painful little tug. "Where are you going?" He twisted on the heels of scuffed black Doc Martin's. "You, Sophia, are truly extraordinary, but it is a sad fact of #life that over time even the marvel of the stars seem to fade. Why? Familiarity. Get used to something, and the magic is lost. It would be utterly tragic should you cease to see that magic in me. We will meet again, extraodinary girl, but this was merely an introduction. It was not meant to be long." With that he was gone from my garden, leaving a curious abscence of noise behind. I didn't even see the door of the garden swing open. I was once again alone. It is moments like that where one becomes acutley aware of both the large and small miseries in one's #life. I became aware, for instance, that the most interesting (and only) boy to ever talk to me that was actually real had walked into and out of my #life in the space of five minutes. Running parallel to these thoughts was a simple track, already taking comfort in the fact that I still had both my pink lemonade and my nutella sandwiches. Soon I would go home, but not quite yet

Casual Apparitions (1) I didn’t want to go home. I was perfectly content with the house we had moved to, as decrepit and nondescript as it was. I liked the skeletal trees with their seemingly morose nature, I liked the flyers that littered the pavement like forgotten first dates, I had even grown to like the ugly red brick building that stood in the middle of the square. Most of all I liked the symbolism of the place, which may have been the reason mum had concluded I was depressed and got me the hell out of there. Her exact words were “It isn’t good for you to be here. It’ll turn you morbid,” followed by a swift dismissal of any protests I may have had. She thought I was in love with sadness or something, which I suppose was just a little too close the truth, but didn’t warrant the uprooting and returning to the place of candy-tinted nightmares. My old house was horrible in an entirely different sense. It was spacious, and open-plan, with perfectly cut gardens and a little wrought iron fence. It was serviceable, and it was reputable and, as I had been told far too many times: it was nice. I hate that word to the point where the sentence doesn’t even deserve a capital. It’s a statement of defeat, nothing more. If something is nice it is sure to be devoid of even the slightest drop of substance. Nice is a waiting room where all the magazines are two years old. Nice is a church hall where the old lady sweeping up was too frail to get the dust from the corners. Nice are the plastic children’s’ toys left abandoned on park benches. And now I had to go live in the nice house which, for all its charm and marble effect countertops had never felt like home, and I couldn’t help but indulge in a little teenage sulk in the backseat as we drove there. At 15, I felt it was justified, owing to the fact that soon I would be expected to outgrow such feeble methods of communication. And we drove. The first thing I did on arrival was claim my room back. I bolted to the attic taking stairs three at a time, threw my suitcase down at my feet and promptly collapsed face first into my bed. I waited there for a few minutes, listening to the footsteps of my parents and sister slowly still, and figured they had all settled into their individual routine. “Okay,” I muttered “guess I’ll have to get used to it here.” “So it would seem, but getting used to is not the same as getting comfortable. Don’t get complacent.” Yes. 15 year old with a plethora of “imaginary” friends. At this exact moment, Far was lounging against the back wall, dressed in the usual tailcoat, band tee and winkle pickers ensemble he swore made him a hit with the proverbial ladies. Yes, I was aware he wasn’t real. No, I did not care. “I’m not getting comfortable,” I confirmed “I’m getting out.” I felt this was a suitably sweeping and angsty thing to say. Far, from his place in the corner, merely raised an eyebrow. I sighed. “Are you aware there’s a mysterious envelope protruding in a very slight and subtle way from underneath your bed?” I was not, except perhaps in the sense that Far was a construct of mine, so I must have noticed on some level. But that was a theory that neither of us enjoyed thinking about. Instead, I let myself slide off the bed and onto the floor, only opening my eyes when I felt the cold of the wood begin to seep through my top. Sure enough, there was an envelope. It was cream, blank, and sealed with a single line of tape. It did indeed look… mysterious. I was of course tempted to open it, but something held me back. Something being either awe or an acute fear of pressure activated explosives. I held myself back. Far gave me a lazy look. It was challenge, albeit a very thinly veiled one. I was tempted to tell him to open it, but considering he was imaginary and teetering madly on the edge of being self-aware, asking him to do physical tasks was a soft spot. I was cruel, but not that cruel at least. “Should I open it?” “Without even the shadow of a doubt.” “It could be dangerous.” “Everything’s dangerous.” “I could die.” “Everyone does… Eventually.” I couldn’t argue with logic like that. I opened it. On the single sheet of paper were the following words: “I am leaving this here because I have to leave soon. Apparently there are people wishing to return to this house, and who am I to stand in their way? From what the landlord has said, they seem to be nice, clean-cute, conventional people. That is tiresome. However, I thought if there was anyone who wasn’t completely bland about to arrive, they certainly would frequent the attic, I know I did. So I am hoping that said interesting person is reading this, as opposed to some clean-freak distant aunt or interfering friend of a younger sibling. If you are neither the aunt nor the friend, congratulations, you are not as horrifically dull as this neigh-bourhood would prefer. Meet me at your favourite spot at lunch time Saturday. If I am as superb as I think I am, I am sure to meet you there. Regards,” Well sugar. That was an adventure gift wrapped and placed in plain sight. In fact, it was orchestrated so perfectly I was inclined to suspect some kind of trick, the imaginary friends often played tricks like that to test my fraying sanity. The plot would normally fall through when I realised the paper I was holding was blank, it was 3AM, and my lips were smeared with Buttercream. As no such thing had happened so far though, I was conflicted. Crossing the room with the letter still in my grasp, I sat down at the table that would once again serve as my desk. Leaving the majority of the furniture when we moved out temporarily had some benefits, such as the fact that the false bottom in the top left drawer was still intact. Inside it, the empty binder still resided, a tribute to when I kept my diary entries in the house, as opposed to as far away from discovery as possible. I tried to ignore Far’s eyes on me as I clipped the letter in and returned the folder to its hiding place. One of the perks of imaginary friends is that if you direct your attention elsewhere they start to blur a little at the edges, and then eventually start fadi- “So?” Oh. Maybe not then “What is it, Far darling?” I used my dryest tone. “Are you going to meet him?” I didn’t bother asking how he knew it was a boy in the same way I didn’t ask how he always knew random details about a person’s home #life at a look, or how he could warn me about injuries I would receive two days in advance. It was just another thing about him, he just knew things. Unlike me, who didn’t even know if was going to go meet this strange, oddly narcissistic sounding boy. “I’d be lying if I said I knew. Staying in this house will send me crazy, you know that, but meeting strangers? In the interest of self-preservation you should be warning me against it already.” Far continued lounging, arching his back away from the wall and scrubbing a hand across his eyes; I could only assume he was trying to appear disinterested. Idly, he pulled a rubber band from his pocket and rolled it between his fingers, eyes flicking to me sporadically. “It could be good for you I suppose. I only ask because I’m curious as to the guy’s character, but could easily go find out about him without being detected, should you decide to ignore him. That would be… Safer.” There are times when I love Far, but there are times when I want to hurl his semi-omnipotent self into a large bag of knives and assorted sherbets. Whenever he tried to tempt me with something because it is “safer”, the second emotion burst vividly to #life. He somehow got the false impression that just because I am grotesquely and immensely introverted and rarely venture outside I am afraid of danger. Not true. Danger is bridges and darkness and fire and knives, none of which have the power to frighten me. However people (or real people at least) are both frightening and wholly unappealing. They clamour and scream and cry and whine and the cacophony is too much to bear. Personally, I don’t understand why more people don’t turn to the imaginary kind for company, far more fulfilling. But it is a soft spot for me now; I cannot rid myself of the compulsion to commit dangerous acts, all in the interest of proving that endangering myself is not a scary thing. In retrospect, perhaps that is not healthy, but it is a habit I cannot kick. As long as I am alone, I can do anything. When I am alone, I am invincible. So Far deciding to dangle this opportunity in front of me like a piece of meat was not a very nice thing for him to do. Manipulating idiot. “You’ve forced my hand Far, you know you have. One problem though.” “Oh?” “I have no idea where I am meeting him.” I felt his attention shift from the rubber band to me, and turned to see the look of feigned contrition on his face. “I do believe he was quite specific about that…” “Yes, if by quite specific you mean not at all specific. My favourite place? That is both morbidly optimistic and incredibly presumptuous. I for one have no idea where my favourite place is. ” The following silence was one-sided not in the sense that one person was talking, but in the sense that one person was radiating a smugness louder and clearer than a thousand words. Quite impressive really, considering the person in question was imaginary. I was not about to give him the satisfaction of asking him if he knew where my favourite place was, if he wanted to tell me he would have to speak up of his own accord. I stood up, pushing my chair away from the desk where I had been sitting, and strode over to my suitcase, idling over the zip. Biting down my smile at how undoubtedly frustrating I was being, I began innocently stacking books onto my shelves, humming a verse from some long forgotten pop song and occasionally stopping to flip through the pages of one of my stories. I glanced backwards, quirked an eyebrow. Far straightened his cuffs and began smoothing his devastatingly perfect hair. The effect was heart-stoppingly beautiful of course, but it had very little effect. I was used to this trick. Back when we were dating it was his weapon of choice and I was able to resist his charm. He must have realised this because he changed tack. Hanging his head he dragged every word from behind his teeth, as though his defeat was causing him physical pain. “Would you like to know where your favourite place is?” he mumbled. I turned, feigning deafness. “Hmmm?” “I said, would you like to know where your favourite place is?” I turned away. “Not really.” “I THINK MAYBE YOU DO.” The caps lock was evident in the tone. “Do I?” “Yes.” I sighed dramatically, something I do exceptionally well considering the shy only child stigma. “Okay Far, where is my favourite place?” He grinned, and I swear I saw the devil dancing in his eyes. Well, it was either that or a winky face emoticon. “Not tellin.’”